Accedian Skylight Benefits

Mario Oosters

Network Architect at a recruiting/HR firm with 501-1,000 employees

In terms of network troubleshooting, not so long ago a new company started (IT hosted on our location), and one of them was complaining about QoS trouble with VoIP telephony. They decided to go with a cloud telephony solution where I did have no say in it. I had to tell them, "I have no idea how this thing works. I have no visibility into any of the management of that solution." They were complaining about bad voice quality. Normally, I shouldn't have been able to know anything about it. But I thought I would just put Skylight on it for a moment to have a look at what was happening. I changed the mirror for a while so that Skylight could see the traffic, and it didn't take long to figure out that there were a few agencies that the company was using that had, at certain moments in time, some notable packet loss and some bad MOS scores on the VoIP part. With that information, I was able to go to the company that gave us the SIP trunk and tell them about it. They changed some parameters, because there was something wrong on their side, and it was fixed. Without that hard information it would have been pretty difficult to find things like that. Skylight is not used on a daily basis, but when it's used it usually helps to fix a problem pretty fast. I don't really have to look into multiple devices because it captures most of them. With that information I can usually say, "Okay, why is your server slow? Maybe you should not have all the thin clients asking every ten seconds about some server." If you have 1,000 thin clients, suddenly you have 100 requests every second. That's what you can easily see with Skylight. I have no idea how much time it has saved when it comes to response time, but I am comfortable saying "a lot." In terms of helping improve interaction between our network, server, desktop and database teams, we're all in the same boat. It has helped me a lot when they have had serious issues. It helps me to say, "You came to me with an issue, I found this information. Which points to a specific problem at some team". It helps them, of course, in figuring out why something is slow/not working... It helps us saving time. We can look for a solution, not the problem. In the past, we had some serious loads on a file cluster, which was mainly due to a few procedures doing some bad things, like passing through an entire directory and asking for every file in the directory tree one by one. While doing that, it continually opened and closed all the total transactions. So it was incredibly slow and incredibly heavy, because of one bad procedure. Skylight helped us a lot at that point in time, especially the server team, to figure out why the file cluster was slow. In the end it was a simple procedure creating havoc on the FILE Cluster. Hard to find when you can't see CIFS traffic. View full review »

Freelanc5c8d

Freelance IT Consultant at SPW (Service Public de Wallonie)

In terms of network troubleshooting, we had an issue with an application, that it was slow for certain users. We didn't understand why. We started to investigate and, thanks to Skylight, we were able to see that the application was very chatty. It was fetching lines one-by-one. That meant it had to do many transactions to get the full bundle from the host. Skylight helped a lot in this case because we could see that there were 1,000,000 small transactions instead of just a few. We didn't have a tool before to investigate end-to-end performance issues. Thanks to Skylight we have a tool for this kind of investigation. When business users are complaining about application problems, we are able at least to identify where the bottleneck is. Of course, if the bottleneck is on the server itself, we will use tools other than Skylight because it is more for network investigation than on the server side. With Skylight we can identify that most of the time is spent on the database or on the proxy or on the application server. It has sped up investigations a lot. Before, we had to spend more time to identify in which block the bottleneck was found. Now it's much faster. It has reduced our mean time to respond by at least 50 percent. In addition, sometimes users complain that they are not getting the data they want. Thanks to Skylight and the PCAP functionality, we are able to capture the traffic and to confirm whether the data was transmitted or not. It's quite important in terms of proof. Skylight has helped to improve the interaction between our network data center and application teams. The server people are now aware of the possibility of investigating the traffic. Thus, when a technical team is facing an issue, they always think, "Okay, maybe I can get more information thanks to Skylight." View full review »

Joel Baczynski

Network Administrator at CHR Citadelle

I do a lot of troubleshooting with Skylight, troubleshooting network speed and application performance. It's really good because we have all the metrics, and it's very easy to find a direct route to the problem. For example, one month ago we had to change a lot of servers in a laboratory. Before the change of the infrastructure, we took a snapshot of the network infrastructure and the performance. After the replacement of the servers, we took the same snapshot, the same picture of the network and the performance. We could see if the network was better and if the server performance was better than the old server. It was easy for us to see if the replacement of the hardware was good or not; or, after the virtualization of a server, if the performance is better or not. Without Skylight it would be difficult to compare because we would not have any measurements. My work is easier with Skylight. It's easier to troubleshoot. It's easier to get a view of my network's health. It has also helped to improve the interaction between our network, data center, and application teams. I can generate a report, for example, of database status or health. It makes it easier to discuss with the database administrators, to explain where a problem is. It's much easier to explain issues and to discuss them with the correct guy. It's very important for us to have it. We save a lot of time when we have a problem. It's very easy to point to the problem and to get to the solution, whether it's a network problem, an application problem, or a server problem. It's very easy with Skylight. In addition, it has improved productivity for sure. Regarding improvements in downtime, it's difficult to evaluate because we had a lot of other sensors to help us know if a server had a problem or if there was a database problem. If it was a big crash, for example, we had that information before we started using Skylight. If the issue is a degradation of an application or a service, Skylight is very useful because we see it on the main dashboard. We see all the applications. It's a critical application. If we have a green, and after that it's orange and then red, we know we have a problem. It's easy. View full review »